Mara Brock Akil always wanted to be a writer. What she didn’t know was how to make a living at it. So she pursued the practical thing and attended one of the country’s top journalism schools, Northwestern University. There, she quickly realized two things: She loved higher education and journalism was not for her.
Working at a newspaper internship, she decided that “the news is not interested in the humanity of us. They didn’t care about the stories I thought were real news and should be included. I was leaning more toward feature-type of writing.”
She pivoted to advertising, but after a friend invited her to an Organization of Black Screenwriters meeting hosted by producer Gus Blackmon, she found her “heart’s desire.” She talked her way into a screenwriting class and wrote her first script, a romantic project called Limits, about a girl in college.
“I went to class and my whole life changed,” she says. “I wrote a script and I fell in love. I had endless energy. I didn’t need to eat. I was in love, and I wanted to be in that world. My whole life changed.”
After graduating, she turned down an advertising job to work as an assistant manager at the Gap in Chicago. The retailer’s management program taught her the skills she’d need to eventually run her own show. She also frequented comedy clubs, where she befriended Mark Adkins, Sinbad’s brother and manager.
“Eventually I knew I had to be in L.A. I couldn’t be John Hughes off the bat and stay in Chicago,” she recalls. She packed up and called Adkins, who was launching The Sinbad Show. He had one job opening left, for a production assistant. Brock Akil jumped at the chance, and wound up meeting writers like Ralph Farquhar and Michael Weithorn, as well as renowned dancer/director/actor Debbie Allen.
“The Sinbad Show was my breakthrough. I got to meet all these writers in that community and be a part of that community, and that’s why I moved along,” she says.
“I was talented with my script, but before they saw my script they saw me. I was on time. I was helpful. Vibes and bringing that energy and spirit and knowing people’s names was my job. All of it matters.”
Through her connections with Farquhar and Weithorn, Brock Akil became a writing trainee on their show South Central in 1994. Two years later, Farquhar enlisted her for the writing staff on Moesha. She was 25 years old.
“And I have not looked back,” she says. “Ralph had a lovely way of rejecting my pitches when I would not give up. He would say, ‘Hey Mara, heard you, love it. But how about you save that for your pilot?’ I started going home and writing down all the things that I was saving for my pilot.”
In 2000, Brock Akil realized her dream of creating and running her own show with the launch of Girlfriends, which ran for eight seasons. Six years later, she also created the nine-season spinoff The Game.
“If you look at TV, you’d think everybody has a murder mystery and everybody’s gonna be in the car chase. That’s not how my life rolls,” she says.
“My pen wants to figure out how to craft people’s real biggest dramas that still entertain and tell a story that is riveting, captivating, funny, emotional, and how the majority of us are actually experiencing life.”
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In 2013, Brock Akil continued that approach with the four-season run of Being Mary Jane, starring Gabrielle Union as a talk show host balancing her personal and work lives. Five years later, the creative got even more personal with the 10-episode series Love Is, which was inspired by her real-life marriage to writer and producing partner Salim Akil. The project explored love between a modern power couple in Black Hollywood in the 1990s.
These days, the real-life couple works together under Akil Productions, but they continue to pursue their own writing projects. As Akil ventures more into art and different mediums of expression, Brock Akil remains interested in relationships and stories around the nuances of love and characters. She’s also passionate about teaching other writers through her residency program, The Writers’ Colony.
“I’m telling my stories and I have this urgency to stay focused on me and follow my heart. To do that, I have to build out more community and more relationships,” she says. “I’m also really excited about The Writers’ Colony, and I want to build that. Salim and I were just over here, the two of us making things together beautifully and I love that era, but you have to keep building out and I’m excited to be in this era, too.”
Mara Brock Akil on Adapting the Judy Blume Novel Forever
What’s on the creative’s heart in this era is her children, and she’s been thinking a lot about the world they’re growing up in.
And so, under an overall deal with Netflix she struck in 2020, she’s adapted Judy Blume’s 1975 novel Forever, which has been frequently banned in schools and libraries for its depictions of teen love.
Notably, the first project she executive produced for Netflix, 2023’s Stamped from the Beginning, was based on Dr. Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. A version of the book aimed at young readers was No. 2 on the American Library Association’s list of the Top 10 Most Challenged Books of 2020.
“I was never really an IP person — I love original stories. I do think you’ll see that in Forever. But my first entries into IP, and I’m going for all the banned books,” she laughs. “It’s funny. I love it. It tickles me that the banned book is now going to go global.”
In adapting Forever, Brock Akil focused on the novel’s essence rather than exact plot points, and added modern teen challenges like social media. In depicting how Keisha (Lovie Simone) and Justin (Michael Cooper Jr.) fall for each other, Brock Akil collaborated with Blume to remain focused on the book’s initial intent and spirit.
“Judy wrote Forever for her daughter in a lot of ways. For young women, it was a pivotal time of agency where the birth control pill was out there and they could think about protecting their future and exploring healthy sex and love,” she says.
“Here I am as a Black mother in the 2020s and I want to see my son have agency as a young Black boy. And now that he’s interested in girls, not become America’s No. 1 threat. Where is his future in the ability to explore his love life and sexuality without being off the bat a criminal? That me and my husband have to talk to our son about rape before he understands love is very harsh, but you’ve got to protect them while they’re also out there trying to figure out who they are.”
Brock Akil says that just as Blume was making space for young girls to see themselves as full human beings and not in service to men, Forever makes space for Black teenagers in a society that isn’t always welcoming.
“How can we be in service to our own lives?” she asks. “I was a journalist. I’m observing the truth, this lived experience, and I want to tell it through fiction. My specificity, my heart’s desire, my musing, is my window into universal storytelling.”
Forever is streaming on Netflix beginning Thursday.
Main image: Mara Brock Akil. Photo by Elizabeth Morris / Netflix
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